Where We Are and How We Got Here
The Future of Humanity, Part 1
This is the first installment of a multi-part series on the modestly-titled topic “The Future of Humanity”. I’ll be rolling out more posts over the next few weeks, exploring some of the best science I can find on the big issues determining our future on this planet: political and economic realities (this post), fossil fuel realities, renewable energy realities, climate tipping-point realities, potential impacts on world population, and possible post-carbon futures for a world without oil. Here are quick links to the rest of the series:
- Part 2: Fossil Fuels … Can’t Live with ’Em, Can We Live Without ‘Em?
- Part 3: Can Renewable Energy Power a Civilization Built on Fossil Fuels?
- Part 4: Childhood’s End
- Part 5: The Coffin in the Room: Catastrophic Impacts on Human Population
- Part 6: The End We Start From
- Part 7: A Post-Carbon Future for Humanity?
We know a lot about the current state of the world, and most of it is not good.
One way to make sense of our current predicament is to imagine all of us at the center of a Venn Diagram like the one above. We are currently enmeshed in three domains of crisis and existential danger. We tend to focus on these separately, as each can produce its own litany of distressing and anxiety-producing narratives, without even mentioning the other two. But this approach — which is common in the mainstream media — misses the many ways in which these domains and crises are intertwined and exacerbate each other, which greatly complicates both the severity and urgency of the emergencies we face.
Three crises
If we want to make an educated guess as to where humanity is heading over the rest of this century and beyond, we need to first understand the main drivers of change in each of these domains, and how they are together pushing humanity toward a narrower and narrower path of diminishing options and outcomes. Where that path will lead us is the topic I want to take up in this and subsequent posts.
In theory, these three domains should function together to support a thriving human population:
- the ecological domain provides the resources we need to survive — energy, food, water, air.
- the political domain provides the mechanisms (governments and institutions) we use to allocate those resources, sometimes fairly, sometimes not.
- the economic domain provides the mechanisms (markets) we use to distribute resources, to put “things” in the hands of people who want or need them.
Over millennia, humans learned how to exploit the world’s natural resources. We developed food crops and domesticated animals. We learned how to specialize and trade. We gave up our hunter-gatherer ways and began to congregate in cities. Generally, we prospered and multiplied, increasing our population to about a billion by 1800. Then we discovered oil … and the world exploded.
The Ecological Crisis
It is impossible to overestimate the revolutionary effects of fossil fuels on humans and the planet. The implications can perhaps best be grasped by considering this fact: the amount of energy contained in one barrel of oil can produce the same amount of work as 23,000 hours of human labor. In other words, extracting the energy from a single barrel of oil is the equivalent of hiring a human laborer for 7.8 years of 8-hour days. And all that work can be bought for a price that fluctuates around $100.
The net effect, of course, has been an exponential expansion in both human population and economic production around the world. Based on the power and availability of cheap fossil fuels, combined with a dizzying flow of technological innovations to harvest their energy, humans have created a worldwide, interconnected economic system of massive scale and capacity. Global trade; transport over land, sea and air; food production, storage and distribution — all of these features of our modern global civilization would be impossible without the energy locked up in the planet’s fossil fuel reserves.
Pretty much everyone living in the wealthy North today believes this is a normal world we live in. They know no other. But it is not normal. In the million year history of homo sapiens, our current world is an unprecedented, essentially instantaneous explosion of people, wealth, innovation and, as we are coming to realize, life-threatening externalities. Nothing remotely like it has ever happened on Planet Earth before. A simple graphic, presented by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy in his book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (an excellent resource, available online here) captures the uniqueness of our current moment:
I believe Professor Murphy is not exaggerating when he calls this “The Most Important Plot Ever”. It is the best, simplest, and most effective illustration of both the bizarreness and the uniqueness of our current situation.
Our two centuries of feasting on fossil fuel energy has led us to a dilemma unlike anything humanity has faced before:
Either we keep burning fossil fuels, in which case we cook the planet, melt the ice caps, and eventually make the Earth uninhabitable for humans. Or we stop burning fossil fuels, in which case we must create a new energy regime based on renewable sources that may or may not be able to power the civilization and population occupying the planet today.
So far, through distraction, denial, and inertia, we have stayed steadfastly on the first path. Any chance of changing course would require a global plan and global political leadership, both of which are nowhere to be found in today’s national governments or supranational organizations. Rather than helping us solve our existential ecological crisis, politicians are busy dealing with their own crises, which are not trivial. For the most part, these involve either promoting or resisting rightwing fascist movements, both in America and around the world.
The Political Crisis
Unlike economics and ecology, politics is hard to ignore. It is where the drama happens, where the heroes and villains stride across the world stage, where the media spends most of its time, and where we tend to focus our attention. We monitor the latest winners and losers, we cheer “our team” and boo “their team”, we plan for victories and lament defeats on the electoral playing field.
But politics, around the world but especially in the United States, has become a deadly obstacle to progress, rather than its engine. It has devolved into a battle between two deadlocked camps, one that sees the existential danger in our dependence on fossil fuels and one that does not. The latter group is leveraging the fact that, in politics, it’s always easier to say no than yes, to block rather than enable. The current world works well for these deniers and their benefactors — it is making them unimaginably rich. They have shown themselves over decades to be unmoved by long-term costs, as long as the short-term gains continue to pour in. And those gains will continue to pour in, but only as long as we have fossil fuels to burn and natural resources to exploit.
Politically, our situation is analogous to being trapped in burning house. The current American Republican Party is like a pile of debris blocking the only exit from the building. So, inevitably, American politics today is focused on clearing that debris so we can get out the door. We may be able to clear the debris and we may not. If we can’t, scientists tell us we will die in the burning house. If we can, we will make it out into the yard, but the house will still be on fire. Now that the debris is cleared away, we can finally face the existential issue confronting us — the fire itself.
Unfortunately, as noted above, the world is bereft of political leadership, the global community has no viable plan, and humans are showing no signs of being willing to voluntarily accept any sacrifices to turn back the forces of destruction we have unleashed.
In summary, our political crisis is one of distraction and paralysis. Sure, we all care whether Donald Trump gets indicted. We all worry about SCOTUS’s next horrific ruling. We all fret about the fate of American democracy. But these issues, in the great scale of of today’s crises, are sideshows. Whether America ends up with a newly-invigorated democracy or an incompetent, kleptocratic dictatorship, we will still be standing outside a burning house with no Fire Department to call. And any solutions will be just as elusive.
We do know one key difference from our experience with COVID under Trump: with Republicans in charge, we can expect things to get much worse much faster.
Politicians are not going to save us. Half of them are essentially hired hit men, paid to stop us from doing anything constructive that would have the slightest negative impact on their donor class. The other half is paralyzed by the first half’s obstruction. The best they can do in this political reality is to squeeze through bite-sized solutions that provide a modicum of progress, like the climate proposals in the recently-passed Inflation Recovery Act. That bill redirects US climate policy in important ways, but its funding proposals also highlight an even more important truth: many of the capabilities needed to transition away from fossil fuels have yet to be invented.
Currently, nothing matching the scale and severity of the ecological crisis is coming out of the political domain. The runaway train has no driver.
The Economic Crisis
Together, our looming ecological crisis combined with our political paralysis is inevitably triggering economic crises.
Economics is actually pretty simple, at least in theory. It’s about demand, supply, and connecting the two through fulfillment. That last step involves not just transport, but also money, debt, multinational supply chains, a web of national and international laws, and enforcement mechanisms at all levels, from personal to global. The economics of fulfillment are, again, simple in theory. Costs of goods fluctuate with the availability of supply and the volume of demand. When either supply decreases or demand increases, prices go up. When the opposite occurs, prices go down. In theory.
In practice, all three aspects of the global economy are in crisis right now. And these crises are neither temporary nor localized.
- On the supply side, we are beginning to experience shortages and disruptions in the availability of many critical materials and commodities: sand, cement, copper, other “critical” minerals like lithium and cobalt, along with microprocessors themselves. In addition, climate change, COVID, and the war in Ukraine are having a significant effect on global food supplies, producing shortages in wheat and other grains. Even coffee beans.
- Demand is now getting battered by inflation, which policy makers want to believe is temporary, but which is clearly going to continue responding to product shortages and supply disruptions, to the extent they continue to occur. In addition, many citizens in the US and other countries are saddled with massive debt, which limits their consumption options. Financial insecurity is a factor as well, with a recent study confirming that 47% of Americans couldn’t handle an unforeseen $500 debt without worry.
- Finally, global supply chains are proving quite vulnerable to fulfillment disruption, even when supply and demand are both healthy. We have seen this in the provision of medical supplies in the US during COVID, and more recently on store shelves: baby formula, toilet paper, tampons, as well as many other common food items. Supply chain disruptions have recently begun to impact the production of solar panels and storage batteries as well.
Like the political domain, the economic domain is not functioning as it should. Suppliers, producers, consumers, regulators, and economists all have their hands full trying to keep the wheels from coming off the global economic bus. Demand increases with population, supply decreases as materials become more scarce and expensive to acquire, and fulfillment is becoming spotty. These issues are closely related to the ecological crises and political paralysis we have just reviewed.
The potentially permanent and accelerating economic consequences of climate change and resource depletion are not things politicians want to acknowledge, because they are not things citizens/consumers want to hear.
The Writing on the Wall
By far, the most important natural resources we need to worry about are the fossil fuels that continue to prop up our global civilization.
The end of fossil fuels
Recall that humans only began to exploit oil and other fossil fuels seriously around 1900. In the ensuing 120 years, we have extracted about 135 billion tons of oil from the Earth. We have burned about half of all that oil since 1991 (source).
It took hundreds of millions of years for the planet’s fossil fuels to form. We started digging them up in volume only about 100 years ago. As noted, they now form the backbone of our civilization. But it looks like they’re all going to be gone within the next 50 to 100 years (source). But not 500 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years — timeframes within which we imagine great civilizations thriving. Even if these estimates are off by a large margin, they represent a stark truth:
We have built a civilization on the back a uniquely powerful energy source that was discovered, exploited, and will be depleted in less than 200 years. What happens when it’s gone?
Let’s allow that to sink in. We have built a global civilization that is totally dependent on the continued burning of fossil fuels. Feeding and fueling our mega-cities, moving food and goods around the globe, extracting the resources demanded by an exponentially growing population of hungry humans — all these activities would grind to a halt if fossil fuels suddenly disappeared. We know now that these fuels will disappear, just not suddenly, and not all at once. And as supplies shrink and extraction becomes more expensive and environmentally damaging, we will begin to see more and more severe economic and environmental dislocations, long before the last barrel of oil is pulled from the ground. Indeed, we are seeing those dislocations already.
Can renewable energy save us?
The increasing viability and dramatically falling costs of alternative energy sources is one of the great success stories of the 21st Century so far. As climate watchdog David Wallace-Wells recently noted:
“The International Energy Agency has declared solar photovoltaic power “the cheapest electricity in history,” and a huge majority of the world’s population lives in places where renewables are already more affordable than power from fossil fuels. Those triumphs are a result of an astonishing decade-long, investment-powered decline in the cost of solar, wind and battery power: Between 2010 and 2020, the cost of solar power fell 90 percent, and the cost of wind and battery power fell nearly as much.” (source)
This is all fantastic news, but there is a fly in the ointment.
If we are expecting renewables to relieve us of our dependence on fossil fuels, we need to face the fact that currently, and into the foreseeable future, we cannot build solar panels, wind turbines, or high-capacity storage batteries without using fossil fuels to manufacture them. Steel, for example, is a vital ingredient in wind turbines. It is an alloy of iron and carbon that can today only be produced in coal-fueled coke blast furnaces at temperatures of 3100° (1700°C). Producing such temperatures is currently possible only by burning energy-dense fossil fuels. Although less CO2-emitting alternatives are being researched, none are yet able to replace the coal-burning plants that produce today’s vital supply of steel (source). Similar production and material constraints affect the manufacture and deployment of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and other renewable-energy devices (source).
Until renewable energy sources can be manufactured, transported, and installed without reliance on fossil fuels, they will not be a CO2-neutral replacement for fossil fuels.
A similar dilemma faces the production of other vital materials central to global civilization. In his book How the World Really Works, climate scientist Vaclav Smil observes that the modern world couldn’t exist without four materials: ammonia (for the manufacture of nitrogen-based fertilizers), steel, concrete, and plastics. All four, he notes, currently require fossil fuels to produce.
It’s not like these problems are unknown to policy makers. As we saw above with regard to the Inflation Recovery Act, political elites are well aware of the challenges involved. They have done the math and realize we cannot achieve the goal we’ve defined for ourselves — a carbon neutral world by 2050 — based on the technologies and knowledge at our disposal today. As John Kerry observed at the COP26 conference in May 2021:
“I’m told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make (to get to near zero emissions) by 2050 or 2045 are going to come from technologies we don’t yet have.”
In other words, we know what we need to do, but we also know we don’t know how to do it.
Meanwhile, the world continues to cook
Perhaps if we had called it “cooking ourselves alive” instead of “climate change”, people would have paid more attention.
As it is, here we are. Climate-driven disasters are becoming part of our “new normal”: droughts, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, pandemics, mega-storms, rising sea levels, food and commodity shortages, biodiversity collapse. Average humans can’t ignore these events, but they continue to treat them as one-offs, each its own little individually-wrapped catastrophe. This is how the mainstream media treats them as well. So far, the great majority of humans are insisting they have more important things to worry about. And their political leaders are giving them no reason to think otherwise.
With the exception of some small but significant energy-production shifts to renewable sources — especially for the generation of electricity, which powers about 20% of the world’s energy needs (source) — the world continues to rely on fossil fuels to power its global civilization. In 2019, after years of warnings from climate scientists and international agencies, only 11.4% of the world’s energy was powered by renewables, 4.3% came from nuclear, and 84% was still produced by burning fossil fuels (source). These 2019 figures come 24 years after the first UN-sponsored climate change conference (COP1) in 1995. We’re now up to COP27 and still burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow. CO2 emissions have continued to rise every year, reaching 421 ppm (parts-per-million) in 2022, almost 50% above the average pre-industrial level of about 280 ppm (source).
The world’s quarter century of inaction on climate change needs to be taken seriously. We are failing, yet we seem to believe we’re going to stop failing any day now. What is likely to really happen?
